Remember
the Peter
Principle? Well it is much worse than that. This is because,
in all likelihood the person who gave that last promotion to
someone who should not have been promoted, had himself reached
his level of incompetence. Thus, in many hierarchical structures
that have been around for a long time, you have incompetence all
the way to the top. This of course explains the systemic disaster
that is our current banking and finance industries.

In
business and even more so in academia and government the single
best way of being successful is to make your superiors happy. In
business you only have to test your ideas against the
marketplace. But good marketing can often sell a mediocre idea.
In non technical academia and in many areas of government, a
person does not even need to test their ideas against the
gullible populace, but only needs to please their superiors. Give
some thought to the implications of this idea. There is little if
any check on stupidity and incompetence. It just keeps
reproducing itself, getting bigger and bigger like... well like a
bubble.

If you
want to see what happens when people get promoted just because
they please their superiors, and there is no real world testing,
then, after looking at the world around you look
here

Want to
see the nature of these experts? Try this
. And here is a more realistic picture of who our leaders are.
They are, as the Chinese would say, the empty drum is the
loudest. Most of our
leaders are empty drums.

These
are the Six books that I have read that give a fairly good
description of the nature of humans and how they work and, with
Sex and War, how evolution caused them to work that way. Although
these books span over 50 years, I think that you will find that
their conclusions and observations are not in conflict with each
other. Some will cover areas that others do not, but if an author
comes to a conclusion it will not be contradicted by another
author.

“The True Believer”“Obedience To
Authority”“Snakes in Suits”

Eric HofferStanley MilgramPaul Babiak,
Robert D Hare

“Thinking in Pictures”“Sex and
War”“For Your Own Good”

Temple GrandinMalcolm Potts, Thomas
HaydenAlice Miller

I
think that these two groups can be thought of as How people are,
at the top, and how they got that way, below.